


Seize the Day

by Hakanaki



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Relationships, Fluff, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 02:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10207898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hakanaki/pseuds/Hakanaki
Summary: Later, Church will blame it on Grif and Simmons’ wedding.Wash isn’t really sureblameis the right word, but if he had to give it a beginning point, he’d probably agree.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peteor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peteor/gifts).



> An embarrassingly late Christmas gift for legitishred!! I'm sorry it took so long!!!! I hope you like it!

Later, Church will blame it on Grif and Simmons’ wedding.

Wash isn’t really sure _blame_ is the right word, but if he had to give it a beginning point, he’d probably agree.

It’s the year of love, according to Donut. Grif and Simmons tie the knot in January in an elaborate ceremony planned and executed by Donut himself. Despite gossip and rumors, there is not a single shotgun in sight that day, for which both Wash and Church are quite relieved. They are also relieved to not be included in the wedding party, who wear awful maroon (for Simmons) or garish orange (for Grif).

Church and Wash get back to their apartment about three hours later than Wash’s self-appointed bedtime, Wash pleasantly tipsy and Church on a collision course with a terrible hangover the following morning. As Wash putters around, fetching water with only an inch less than his usual grace, Church lounges on the couch, complaining.

(So really, a fairly standard Tuesday night for them, minus the whole wedding part. And the part where it’s three hours later than when Wash normally forces himself into bed.)

“When we get married,” Church starts, flinging his skinny left arm out to dangle over the armrest of the couch, “We’re just gonna go to the courthouse and not tell anyone. Then we’re gonna take an awesome vacation. Somewhere warm.”

Wash pauses, his heart swelling at the word _when_ in ways that are utterly inappropriate given the circumstances. He offers Church the first water bottle. “I’ve always wanted to go skiing,” he says mildly.

“Jesus _Christ_ , Wash, I am _not_ gonna be freezing my balls off on my own honeymoon!” Chruch gripes, draining the water bottle in a show of practiced efficiency.

“There are those ice hotels in Russia or something. That’d be cool, too,” he continues, pouting his lips as he tries not to smile. Being tipsy makes playing straight man a lot harder.

“Shut the fuck up. It’s fucking _January_ and I’m freezing. Can we go to our nice, warm bed now?” Church says. He’s hitting the whiney part of drunkenness. The whiney part is Wash’s least favorite.

Later, wrapped up in thick blankets and each other, Church presses kisses against his collarbone in the darkness. “I mean I guess if you really wanted to go to Russia we could go. But only if we have a summer wedding,” he amends.

Wash bolts up and stares at him in the dark. His heart is doing that _thing_ again, where it feels too big in his chest. It’s making him panic a little as he fumbles for the bedside lamp and turns it on.

“Ow, what the hell, Wash,” Church complains, squinting against the sudden light. “I’m trying to sleep, here!”

“Are you… Are you proposing to me right now?” Wash stammers, staring wide-eyed at his… fiancé?

The silence that falls over them is heavy and… moist, as Church sneezes in shock.

“I’m drunk,” Church announces matter-of-factly. “This would be the worst proposal ever,” he points out.

“Of all time,” Wash agrees hurriedly. “Seriously, of all time.”

“ _No_ , I’m not proposing. You’ll know when I propose to you. I’ll knock you right off your feet with how smooth I am,” Church promises, stretching his limbs out and managing to smack himself in the face.

“You’re the best,” Wash deadpans, shoving a pillow into his face.

“Love you, too, jackass,” says the pillow.

* * *

Valentine’s Day comes without a single mention of marriage from either of them. They don’t even go anywhere, just come home from work at their usual times, change into sweats, and order an obscene amount of Chinese food.

Church is wrapped around him like a needy coil of cool skin, leeching Wash’s body heat and unapologetically. Wash is focused on delicately picking every last slice of cashew out of his takeout container while Church uses the hand that’s not jammed up into Wash’s armpit to navigate his phone.

“Huh,” he comments after a minute.

Wash continues to chase the last cashew half around the bottom of the box. It’s suctioned there with the sauce, he can just tell, and the chopsticks are too blunt to really lift it. He glares at it, trying to will it into his mouth.

“Huh,” Church says again, louder. He takes his other hand back and shifts so he’s sitting more upright on Wash’s thighs.

“What?” Wash asks, extricating the troublesome cashew with a flourish of victory. MSG never tasted better.

“Sarge and your therapist got married,” he says absently, thumb scrolling through a bunch of pictures.

“Sarge and _Emily?_ ” Wash cries, jolting up as much as he can with Church cutting off the circulation in his legs.

“Hey! Easy, tiger,” Church complains, swatting at his thigh. “I’m sitting here!”

“ _Sarge and Emily got married?_ ” Wash asks again, his voice ascending into that screechy range he uses when Church conducts science experiments in the microwave.

“Yeah, they went to the courthouse—figures,” Church says, cutting himself off. “Now we’ll never know his real name.”

“It’s Andrew,” Wash says absently, setting his empty container down. He snatches Church’s phone from him so he can scroll through the pictures himself. Sure enough, there they are. Sarge with his shotgun— _did they really let him bring the shotgun into the courthouse?_ —and Emily with her curls twisted into an elegant bun on top of her head. He ignores Church sputtering behind him as looks through the rest of the pictures. Apparently, they’re taking a trip to the country for a weekend honeymoon of riding horses.

“That’s nice,” Wash says, handing Church back his phone and cutting off his rant about information-you-don’t-withold-from-your-boyfriend. “It suits them.”

“I _hate_ you,” Church groans. “Why aren’t you outraged by this?”

Wash shrugs. “I mean, isn’t that the kind of wedding we talked about?”

Suddenly, the only sound in the apartment is the background buzzing of several electronics. Wash feels the panic climb up his throat the longer it goes on, because he’s really ruined it now, they haven’t talked about it at all since Grif and Simmons’ wedding and—

“No,” Church says.

“No?”

“No, you are _not_ proposing to me right now. You are absolutely not proposing to me on _Valentine’s Day_ , because we are better than that.”

“Oh.” The relief floods out of him like a balloon. Then—

“I wasn’t proposing,” Wash says in his own defense. “That would’ve been—“

“The worst proposal ever of all time,” Church says in one breath, already back to looking up news articles on his phone. “Yeah, I get it.”

* * *

The year of love continues, seemingly stopping for no man. Sarge and Emily come back from their honeymoon and immediately begin new careers of getting into everyone’s business.

“Washington,” Sarge says magnanimously one night, “Sometimes the day comes when you need to just settle down and find a little lady who loves shooting guns as much as you do.” He pauses to take a bite of steak. “Or in your case, a scrawny blue who loves yapping about perfectly reasonable electronics arrangements,” he amends.

Wash sighs, poking at his baked potato sullenly. He can still hear the shrieks from the day Church decided Sarge’s entertainment system was an electrical fire waiting to happen. Wash personally thinks that the setup was probably fine, but he was also banned from using the toaster last week after an unfortunate incident involving a power surge, some very toasted toast, and Church losing a whole five minutes of game data in Dragon Age.

“Is that really any of your business?” he says dryly, mashing butter into his potato. The VA holds a steak and potatoes dinner for seniors every month, and they both work the event. Volunteers get a free dinner once all the old men and their wives leave and the chairs and tables are stacked neatly in the corners. It’s usually a surprisingly pleasant interaction with Sarge—or, it was before he got married.

“All I’m saying,” Sarge says louder, gesturing with a bit of steak speared onto the edge of his knife. “Is that even blues can find love! I know, it’s something of a change of heart for me to even consider the blues to be human beings—“

“Sarge, that Halo tournament started and ended before I met _any of you._ There is no red. There is no blue. Church, my boyfriend, is a human being,” Wash cries in exasperation. It’s an old argument, and he has made as much traction as bicycle wheels on ice in all the time they’ve spent together.

“Fine,” Sarge concedes morosely, shoving a too-large bite of steak into his mouth. For a moment, there is nothing but blessed silence as they eat their food. When they finish, they rinse off the plastic plates and make sure the kitchen is as clean as they found it with the kind of silent precision that comes from the armed forces. This is why he likes Sarge. Sarge gets it, the weird and almost ritualistic way to make a kitchen sparkle in five minutes flat.

The silence holds until they’re in the parking lot, brushing the snow from a late storm off their cars.

“Wash, I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Now, see, if you and Church go and make yourselves legal in, say…the next two months, I will win a lot of money. Fair money! Money I worked hard to earn! Donut wanted to be the one to organize the betting pool, and he wanted to throw glitter on you for every day past March 1st you two weren’t bound together in Holy Matrimony!” Sarge shouts from behind his massive red truck.

He hates Sarge.

“I’ll be sure to get right on that,” Wash deadpans, slamming the door of his compact and speeding away as fast as the weather allows.

* * *

“We’re never getting married,” Wash announces to Chruch that night.

Church makes a noncommittal noise, his elbow jerking as he plays some kind of game on his phone. Wash peers over his shoulder just in time to see Church’s character splat into a wall and die.

“Well, that’s just great,” Chruch mutters, closing out of the game in annoyance. He turns to Wash, green eyes sharp and calculating. “Can we still take a honeymoon trip?”

Wash groans and leans back against the pillows.

“Look, forget Russia, okay? Tokyo is the place to be right now. They’ve got fiber-optic internet like, everywhere.”

Wash smacks him in the shoulder.

“Is that a no?”

Wash throws a pillow.

* * *

Summer bashes are Tucker’s thing. They used to be Church, Tucker, and Grif’s thing, when the three of them lived together with Caboose, but with Caboose building houses in South America for the next two years, the responsibility falls fully on Tucker now.

…Which only means that the food-alcohol ratio is reasonable again and that there are no more ridiculous light shows on the dance floor. The getting completely wasted on mystery punch and finding a way to break something by the end of the night hasn’t changed a bit.

Wash doesn’t really do parties, but he always makes an exception for Tucker’s summer bash. It’s the only party that Church seems to enjoy, too, and the only people there are people that both of them already know. Unlike Church, however, Wash partakes in as little of the neon (turquoise?) mystery punch as possible. There’s Squirt in it.

Things are progressing as they normally do. It’s almost midnight, so Simmons is slouched over an armrest somewhere, asleep and oblivious to the commotion. Grif is taking the opportunity of “Simmons doesn’t have to know” to eat not one, not two, but three entire bags of spicy nacho Doritos. Lopez is staring critically at the lamp that served as this year’s sacrifice, Sarge and Emily are doing things no one should have to see on the dance floor, and Tucker is… making a speech.

“I just wanna thank you all for coming,” he slurs into the toy megaphone that belongs to his son, who is with his grandparents for the night. “Every year I do this thing and you all… are just… you all always come,” he gushes. “And that’s just great. I love you all.”

The crowd boos.

“But there’s one of you I love the most!” Tucker continues, screaming into the ridiculous purple megaphone. “More than anyone I’ve ever loved before, and you all know that I’m a lover. Can we get a spotlight on my drop dead sexy gorgeous girlfriend Kai for a second? Church?”

Church scoffs from where he’s standing next to Wash, leaning against the wall. “Idiot. I can’t just fucking pull a spotlight out of my ass,” he grumbles. Louder, he yells, “Insert spotlight here!”

“Thanks Church. You’re a real fucking pal, you know?” Tucker drawls sincerely, too drunk to put the proper sarcasm into it. “Anyways. Have you all seen Kai? Like, really seen her? She could have anyone in the entire world and like, she’s with me!” he says, beaming. “Like what the fuck, I am the luckiest son of a bitch in this house right now.”

“You’re damn right you are, Bubble Butt!” Kai shouts from the crowd, flicking her hair over her shoulder.

“Thanks, Babycakes,” Tucker says back. Then he stands there for a moment.

“He forgot what he was gonna say,” Church says helpfully.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” Tucker admits.

“He doesn’t know where he’s going with this,” Church predicts. Wash elbows him in the side.

“But I do know where I’m going with this!” Tucker practically screams, making the cheap megaphone shriek a little. “Kaikaina Grif!!”

“Whaddya want?” Kai screams back from the crowd, face lit up with a million-watt smile.

“Will you make me the luckiest son of a bitch in the world and marry me?”

A hush falls across the room. Church’s jaw drops open. Wash waits for him to close it, but he doesn’t.

Kai looks around the room, as if considering something.

“Wait, _what?!_ ” Grif cries from the kitchen, storming into the living room with Doritos dust all over his face. “Dude! Did you just propose to my sister? Without even asking me?”

“Uh, yes?” Tucker says meekly into the megaphone. “And I would really like an answer, Kai, so if you could like, save me from murder by 300 pounds of Doritos, that’d be great,” he says quickly.

The party dissolves into chaos after that. Grif tackles Tucker. Tucker continues to shriek into the megaphone, which somehow doesn’t get crushed in the fray. Donut flits around the room excitedly, bouncing horrific wedding ideas off of all who will listen to him. Kai says yes at some point, and Tucker slides an impressive ring onto her finger with Doritos dust clinging to his dreads. Glitter emerges from somewhere—Donut, definitely Donut—and manages to coat everyone’s clothes within seconds. It’s a total disaster.

In the aftermath of it all, Church and Wash stay late so Church can obligatorily bitch at Tucker about his recent life milestone instead of congratulate him like a normal person. Wash decides to skip that part and goes out onto the porch to wait for him, saying goodbye to his friends who are in various states of iridescence and inebriation. Grif has his arm looped around Simmons, who’s sneezing glitter and muttering something about mental arithmetic. Sarge wears the glitter in his hair terrifyingly well, marching out of the house with a giggly Emily Grey swung up into his embrace.

His friends are all disasters. No one can do anything normally.

And yet…

Grif murmurs a comment of agreement somewhere in the middle of Simmons’ rant and presses a kiss to his glittery hair. Emily giggles until she collapses back against Sarge’s shoulder with a happy sigh and an “oh, Andrew,” on her lips. He can see Kai in the open doorway of the house, suspiciously sober after four or five of Tucker’s electric aqua poisons, sitting next to the staircase with her back pressed into the wall. She’s got her hand outstretched before her, staring at the beautiful ring around her finger with awe and adoration.

They do it all right in the end.

Wash feels his heart swell again, the way it’s been doing on and off all year, the way it’s been doing since he met Church for coffee one day and blurted that he thought his eyes were pretty. He can’t think of any other way he’d want to spend this life, he realizes. He wouldn’t change a single thing, not his disjointed childhood, his military service, the injury that got him discharged, therapy, any of it—every one of those moments has led to this one.

And in this moment…

“Look at you, staring off into space again. C’mon space cadet, Tucker’s weird drinks gave me a headache and I wanna go to bed.”

…all he wants to do is seize the day.

Wash pulls Church into a searing kiss, cutting off his rant. Church doesn’t kiss back for a moment, probably taken completely off guard by Wash’s rare display of spontaneous PDA, but when he does, he tastes as desperate and as decisive as Wash feels. They break away, foreheads pressed together as if in prayer.

“Let’s go down to the courthouse tomorrow,” Wash says, staring straight into those pretty green eyes. “I wanna marry you.”

Church’s eyes widen comically, and he shoves Wash away from him with a snort. He buries his face in his hands for a moment, as if trying to wipe the sheen of alcohol off of him.

Wash’s phone buzzes with a Facebook notification.

“You fucking _ass_ ,” Church grumbles. “Is that what you call a proposal? I take back what I said on Valentine’s Day. _This_ is the worst proposal ever. Of all--“

“Tucker just screamed a proposal into a toy megaphone,” Wash interjects, raising an eyebrow.

“That is a valid point,” Church muses. He pauses for a moment, as if considering. “Actually, now that I think about it, your proposal was probably the best of anyone we know.”

“The best?” Wash says, a grin spreading across his face.

“Ever. Of all time,” Church says sagely, grabbing Wash’s hand. “C’mon, _fiancé_. I still wanna go to bed. And don’t think I’m putting out!”

Wash shakes his head, still grinning. He can’t seem to get his face to do anything else. “Sure thing,” he agrees, leading Church off of the porch and to the car.

Tomorrow, the news will make the rounds via an entrepreneurial Kaikaina Grif, who cajoles no less than two hundred dollars out of their bizarre little family.

But tonight…

“Can we still go to Russia for our honeymoon?”

“You know what? Sure, Wash. Why the fuck not.”

Tonight, everything feels just right.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me screaming about all things on my [tumblr!](tumblr.com/user/hakanakiki)


End file.
